Unholy Dimensions (26 page)

At the first landing I took another moldering, stench-ridden flight, and at the second landing a strange sight lay before me. On the moldering floor of the landing lay an odd chunk of crystal, black in the beam of my light...with red striations. It lay just outside a closed door of rotting greenish wood. My excitement temporarily banished my fears as I knelt and retrieved this obvious fragment of my searched-for object, holding it close to my face to make out the weird, unearthly hieroglyphs plainly carved into its surface. And then another surprise took me – as I recognized the horrifying symbols as resembling some I had seen only that day in the fabled pages of the hideous text of the
Necronomicon
of that Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred!

Excitedly, gripping my trusty pocket flashlight in my teeth, the crystal fragment in one hand and the book in the other, I compared the symbols of the crystal to those on those hell-penned arcane pages. Yes! I was correct. Here were the very symbols, part of some weird incantation meant to be chanted at a ritual of untold nightmarish motivation. As I read the Latin translation of that ancient, mysterious language I muttered the words under my breath and moved what little I had of the infamous crystal in strange geometric patterns as dictated by the text. This mumbled chanting was difficult to accomplish with my trusty pocket flashlight gripped in my teeth.

Just then, there was a strange noise behind the moldering greenish door, inside the
unknown room beyond,
which made me start and look up and nearly drop the flashlight from my jaws...a sound as of something large and
alive
shifting its weight on creaking, moldering floorboards.

I slipped the crystal fragment into one pocket and the
Necronomicon
into another, took the flashlight in my left hand and willed myself to reach to the knob of that horrid closed door with my trembling right. I was not alone in that gambrel-roofed haunt of ancient horror, and I knew I must confront my unknown companion face to face.

My uncertain hand closed on the cold knob – too late to turn back now – and twisted it until it clicked, and the door opened inward. I pushed it away from me, it swung on its creaking hinges, and I moved the beam of my flashlight into the room.

What stood thus illumined before me nearly drove me insane with God-forsaken fright and nausea, and I was torn between fleeing with a shriek, swooning in a faint, and standing in mute, frozen paralysis – this last winning out. A wave of unbearable stench wafted over me as from a thousand opened corpses, and yet this prodigious miasma of fecal proportions could not but hint at the greater horrors which assailed my eyes in that face to face confrontation I had so ignorantly sought.

The creature looming in that room of doom was more frightful and hideous than words can describe...no language or pen of man could hope or would even attempt to portray its unholy vision, so utterly beyond description was it in its hideousness. It was nine feet tall at the least, and all made of some rubbery stuff I hesitate to call flesh, with nineteen swimming tentacled appendages, each ending in four jointed, insect-like arms tipped in multiphallic protrusions. The seven legs were as those of an elephant stripped to the bone, and the waist was encircled with red glaring eyes with swimming black lashes as profoundly luxuriant as the underarm hair of a hirsute foreign female. And the face – God help me – was that of a skull with its flesh ripped off and crumpled up into two balls and
crammed back into the sockets instead of eyes, the tongue like the lashing tail of a fly- maddened horse. It was like the most hideous, nightmarish thing that could have been shown to the eyes of man...the ultimate zenith of horror, unparalleled and insurmountable – only worse.

The crystal for which I had searched must have been what I had heard fumbled and shattered, for now this otherworldly demon was juggling the remaining pieces in its nineteen branching, tentacled arms with a fiendish and boastful skill. As it leered at me triumphantly I finally broke free of my vocal paralysis and screamed. But it was strange words from the book in my pocket that came from my mouth inexplicably. Yog-Sothoth! Ia! Xqyrhe! Rhrhszj!

Even now as I stand in the threshold of that damned room of doom, frantically typing out this last frenzied message and warning to all mankind, that leering and juggling horror bears inexorably toward me! God save me! That stench of open crypts, of the very septic system of other dimensions! Its breath is now upon me...those phallic projections! Ia! Yog-Sothoth!
Ouch!

Out of the Belly of Sheol

The
clouds crashed one atop the other and boomed like an angry surf. The ocean roared like thunder and churned as black as rain clouds. It seemed one had become the other -- that the world had been turned on its head.

Jonah was glad for the men who held his arms; otherwise -- looking straight up beyond the sails that thrashed like tortured ghosts -- he had the vertiginous terror that he would fall upwards
into that vortex of sky. Sucked up into the maw of the God he had failed.

They had found him lying in the hold of the ship bound for Tarshish, and knowing that he was said to be a holy man had bellowed at him to awaken and talk to his God...but he had not been sleeping. He was a prophet, and he couldn’t describe to these simple sailors, who were fortunate not to be prophets, how the mind could become filled until the body fell helpless with the weight of the cosmos inside it.

He thought of the sensation of an encroaching prophecy as being like the tendrils of a strange plant snaking inside his skull, growing at an accelerated rate, winding into the very fissures of his brain, embracing and interweaving, suffocating and transfiguring. Out at sea, the sensation had appropriately felt like a serpentine invasion of squirming, choking seaweed. Whereas his bouts with prophecy usually seemed to drag him up into the ether, this time he had felt he was being dragged down into a dark liquid abyss.

He still shook with the blurred tatters of his visions. Rain shattered against his craggy face, dripped from his sodden beard, collected in the folds of his robes. The deck veered sharply; he heard men cry out, scrabble for purchase. They cried out to God to spare them, and to Jonah to pray as well if God were willing to listen to him alone.

They thought God was one voice, one form, one being who looked much like Jonah did. Like a parent a child could appeal to, converse with. They would kill Jonah if he told them the truth. Their poor minds, small clumps of earthly cells, could not contain the truth: that there were many Gods, and Jonah did not always know which one he listened to.

He had likened his situation to standing in a bustling marketplace, where the confusion of voices was the voices of the Gods. And not only did he hear the voices, but the thoughts of all these hordes of people. Therefore, he could not always separate one voice or thought from another. He might catch a moment of this message, a snatch of that one. They were seldom meant for -- directed at -- him. He simply had this ability to hear the cacophony of the Gods.

Some of these beings were dead, and the words that his mind intercepted had been spoken thousands of years earlier, to float out into the heavens aimlessly. Some of the words he overheard, like an eavesdropper at a keyhole, drifted to him from the future. Certain Gods had sympathy for the animal called man, and others despised him – while most couldn’t have cared much either way. The heavens were as filled with the creatures his kind had labeled Gods as the land teemed with animals, and the seas with fish. One could not always see the fish that swarmed beneath the waves; the most that could be hoped for was a brief flash of bright scales. But Jonah could see beneath the waves of the heavens, so to speak.

The people who knew of his ability believed it to be a gift from Heaven. But Jonah was more inclined to think of it, many days, as a curse from Sheol – the Hebrew word for “cave”...and the Underworld.

By the time the men had found Jonah is his trance below, and then taken him above, they had already thrown overboard as much of the cargo they transported as they could to lighten the vessel’s weight. Now with Jonah on deck, in desperation, they cast lots in an attempt to determine who amongst them was responsible for the evil of this unnatural storm. The result of their ritual, however primitive in its superstition, indicated Jonah.

The captain of the ship got close in his face and shouted through gritted teeth, “Our ship is soon to break up, man! Why has this evil come amongst us? What is your business going to Tarshish? What is your occupation? Where are you from?”

Jonah replied with a calm born of fatalistic weariness, “I am a Hebrew, named Jonah, son of Amit’tai of Gath-he’pher. I go to Tarshish to escape an errand I was commanded to attend to.”

“And what errand was that?”

“I was to go to the city of Nineveh, and deliver a message there.”

“A message from whom?”

Jonah hesitated, but then made his explanation simple for the simple man. “A message from the Lord.”

The mariners ringed around the bearded man gasped, either stepped back from him or closer to him in horror. The captain snarled, “The Lord commanded you, and you fled from Him? And now we suffer because of it! Why did you not do as He instructed?”

How could he tell this man that he was tired of listening to voices, tired of sifting through them for meanings that might be of benefit for his fellow creatures? That he wished he could flee to some deep, dark and silent cave where he would never have to hear another voice again?

Some being, angered at the imagined wickedness of the vast city of Nineveh, capital of Assyria – and recognizing Jonah’s gift of receptiveness – had ordered him to go to the city and denounce it, threaten it. But he had wanted no part of it. He had not wanted to risk that the citizens might doubt him, perhaps kill him. He had not wanted to witness their mass panic, if they believed him. And he had not wanted to be the instrument of yet another petty, furious God casting His judgments on the behavior of creatures whose lives, however puny, were none of His business.

He could only tell the captain, “I thought to flee, but now I understand I cannot flee this wrath. I am sorry I have endangered any of you.”

“Well, old man, what can you do to appease the Lord so this tempest will cease? This is your fault – you must save the rest of us!”

The ship rose like a toy upon a titanic wave, and the men seized each other in their efforts to remain on their feet. Jonah heard the howl of a man who was pitched overboard, but several others grasped hold of him at the last moment and hauled him back. Yes, they would all die. And yes, it was his fault. Why should these men suffer because of his curse...and his cowardice? They had families, children back home. He had none. He was just a wandering madman, with the gibberish of mad Gods in his skull. He wanted it to be over. Blessed silence. Even if it could only be found in death...

He said to the captain, “Throw me into the sea, man. My
life should satisfy this crea–” He amended his words. “Our angry Lord.”

“What? I’ll have no innocent blood on my hands!” He turned to roar to his crew, “Row! Row for all you are worth! Turn the ship back toward Joppa!”

Sun-bronzed, rain-spattered muscles and tendons pulled taut with effort, but their straining efforts were useless. The rains slashed the ship, the mast creaked as if it might snap like the sapling it had once been, the whipping sails cracked like lightning. At last, the captain grabbed Jonah by the arm again and called to the churning sky, “We beg you, Lord, to spare us! We have no desire to kill this man – but if it is Your will, then so be it!” He returned his attention to Jonah. “I am sorry, old man.”

Jonah nodded, and held out his arms to be taken. “It is for the best, my son. Take me, you men. Cast me into the sea.”

And so now, with the ship tossing, the men walked Jonah unsteadily to the side. He gazed up one last time at the skies. He hoped this would make the being happy – make all the Gods happy. Though his heart crashed like the waves, he smiled bitterly. Maybe this wasn’t what the God wanted, after all. But it was what he wanted.

The men took Jonah to the edge of the deck...and he did not resist them, as they shoved him over the side.

An explosion of cold, all around him. An enveloping blackness. It snatched the breath from his lungs, and he thought he would die in that very instant. But though his mind wanted to die, his body’s blind instincts for survival took over, and he waved his limbs frantically in an effort to break the surface again.

Jonah threw his head above the water with a desperate gasp – and then he stared in amazement at the ocean around him.

The ship bobbed on calm waters. Though the sky was still heavy with black clouds, the rains had stopped. Already, then, the angry God had been satisfied by his sacrifice?

As he tread water, he heard the voices of the men aboard the ship crying out to the Lord in thanks and in awed terror at His powers. And then he heard a man – the captain, he realized – shout out loudly in horror. He was pointing out to sea, at something behind Jonah. Jonah stirred the waters with his arms in order to turn about and look, even as more voices were raised in fear.

His heart stopped in his chest, then shuddered back to life reluctantly, at what he saw sharing the cold waters with him.

At first, he thought the vast, gray creature he saw rising to the surface might be a whale. Though he had never seen one, by his reckoning it must be a whale larger than any ever encountered. But no – it was more than that. He saw a long serpent’s neck break the surface. It raised itself, seemed to peer about, then crashed under the waves again. Then, it rose again. And a second serpent rose with it. A third. They wavered at the sky, coiling around each other. Now he knew what he was seeing! He had heard legends told of immense squid that would do battle with whales. This great creature he saw must be a whale in the embrace of such a tentacled nightmare.